Preach the Gospel at all times, and – when necessary – use words. (St Francis)
The gospel records make it clear that there were times when Jesus had to be away on his own. He drew strength from solitude and silence. And one of our major challenges in this 21st century, in the secular culture in which God has placed us, and in what’s left of a bothered, noisy chattering church, is not only to find better ways of being a disciple, of loving God and the world – but of finding words to describe this, at any rate to ourselves. The church scarcely has vocabulary, or ordered mind, for expressing what we have to teach now – or else, the words it has are large and technical. In this task one of the helpers is Richard Rohr, American Franciscan friar. He reminds us that the silence is already within. We don’t so much learn to be still and silent, as that we find it there already, in stillness and silence, at levels beyond all our worthy noise and activism. We locate the quiet space, the inner room, where now we can learn to hear and see. It is another way of knowing… it can be communicated with economy of words.
The Latin contemplatio doesn’t mean thinking, working it out, it means seeing what is there. Our prayer, what Jesus called the inner room, is where we begin to see… as we are setting to one side, for now, as we can, all our usual stuff, thought and imaging and imagining, remembering, re-living, planning. Richard Rohr says this is a form of knowing beyond reacting – emotion is set to one side. For most of us that is quite a change – in our 21st century culture emotion, “how do you feel…?” is paramount information… TVNZ regards feelings as news. But we set aside, for now, our thinking, working things out. In Richard Rohr’s own words:
The soul does not use words. It surrounds words with space, and that is what I mean by silence. Silence is a kind of wholeness. It can absorb contraries, paradoxes, and contradictions. Maybe that is why we do not like silence. There is nothing to argue about in true inner silence, and the mind likes to argue. It gives us something to do. The ego loves something it can take sides on. Yet true interior silence does not allow you to take sides. That is one reason contemplation is so liberating and calming. There are no sides to take and only a wholeness to rest in—which frees us to act on behalf of love.[1]
I know very well how strange that can sound. We are programmed to do things, to react with how we feel or what we think, or what happened to us. We do it incessantly. Our reaction to dire things happening in the world is to feel helpless, or at any rate, if we can, we do something. And God bless all those who do achieve things, and all who try. Jesus invites us first to listen and to see… to be wise. Wisdom (σοφια) in Jesus’s understanding came from stillness, silence, solitude, attention to God. So Mary of Bethany had chosen the better way, he said. In the house of Simon the Pharisee, when the distraught woman came in embarrassing them all, Jesus’s words were, Do you see this woman…?[2] Of course they didn’t; what they saw was an interruption, a nuisance and an intrusion… and an unauthorised female. It was Jesus who saw, from the silence of his inner room, the woman God knew and loved.
[1] Richard
Rohr, Silent Compassion: Finding God in Contemplation
(Franciscan Media: 2014), 4-7.
[2]
Luke 7:44
No comments:
Post a Comment